Television
Monkey puzzle
Alexander Chancellor
No need to study those expensive Government advertisements about Aids if one watched Horizon (BBC2) last Mon- day. This told one everything one could want to know about the disease, and probably more. It may have started in monkeys. At any rate, some African monkeys have been found to have a virus almost indistinguishable from the Aids virus, but doing them no harm. This virus may have jumped at some point from a monkey into a human being, becoming evil and malignant in the process. Monkeys are now paying the price for starting the Aids epidemic (if that is what they did) by being asked to cure it. They are being infected with Aids and then injected with trial vaccines to see if any of them do any good. The most promising so far comes from the bark of an Amazonian oak tree.
A lot of the programme was about research into methods of treatment, but the conclusion was that a cure, if it exists, is still a very long way off. For the time be- ing, Aids remains effectively untreatable.
Most of the world's Aids victims are in central Africa. It is thought there are between 10 and 20 million sufferers there. African governments are loath to admit this. They like to imagine it is a punish- ment wrought on the white man for his decadent homosexual practices and that it only exists in Africa where white homosex- uals have been. But, in fact, it is transmit- ted among Africans by heterosexual con- tact. It is also heterosexually transmitted in the West, but to a much lesser extent. A research project among American prosti- tutes showed that only four per cent of them had the virus.
One of the problems facing medical researchers is the reluctance of Aids suffer- ers to co-operate. Because in the West the condition is associated with homosexual promiscuity and with drug addiction (the sharing of syringes being the second main cause of its spread), it attaches a moral stigma to the victim. A very respectable American nurse, who had somehow con- tracted the disease, described on the pro- gramme how even her medical colleagues in hospital would refuse to come near her when they discovered what was the matter.
In America now there are thought to be about 1,750,000 carriers of the Aids virus — mainly in the 'gay' cities of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. Of these about 17,500 are full-blown sufferers who are threatened with death. In Europe, there are altogether about 2,000 such victims, of which 275 cases are in Britain. The other main centres of the disease are Brazil with 540 cases, Canada with 400, Haiti with 400 and Australia with 170 (mainly in Sidney).
Apart from the fact that Aids attacks the immune system and makes the sufferer likely to die from diseases he would other- wise comfortably endure, it can have the other very depressing effect of attacking the brain, bringing on dementia. It is, in short, a horrible complaint, incurable and likely to go on spreading. It is, however, very difficult to catch except through homosexual activity, and the only way to be confident of avoiding it is by practising what is now called 'safe sex'. In the Government advertisements this is known as 'hugging, squeezing and feeling'.
`Safe sex' now seems to be catching on, particularly among the homosexuals of San Francisco where the number of Aids vic- tims now seems to be holding steady. According to Professor Bill Jarrett of Glasgow University, Aids may not be a new disease at all. It may have been around for a long time and only have started spreading with the advent of 'the permissive society'. It is now beginning to operate as a potent moral corrective. Aids is admittedly a gloomy subject, but I can see no good reason why the produ- cers of Horizon had to use spooky electro- nic background music throughout the pro- gramme, as if it were a suspense horror movie. Nor could I begin to understand the scientific explanations, which used graphics portraying the Aids virus as a ball covered with bobbles which somehow locked into the body's cells and messed them up. But it was a good programme all the same.
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